About Me

Friday, June 29, 2012

The film was Thank Your
Lucky Stars, one of the handful of big
all-star musicals, some of them (like the independently made Stage Door
Canteen and Warners’ Hollywood
Canteen — the latter inspired by
the fact that the real-life Hollywood Canteen had been founded by Bette Davis
and John Garfield, both Warners’ contractees) directly inspired by the war
effort. This one was only indirectly inspired by the war effort: producers
Farnsworth (Edward Everett Horton) and Dr. Schlenna (S. Z. Sakall) are putting
together a big benefit for Atlantic Charities (an effort to raise money for
survivors of air-raid attacks in allied countries) and for that they’ve decided
they need the singer Dinah Shore (shown in a considerably less flattering
hairstyle than she got later but still recognizable both physically and
vocally). Unfortunately, Shore is under exclusive contract to radio star Eddie
Cantor (playing himself), an insufferable egomaniac who insists on putting his
personal stamp on everything he gets involved with, telling old, lame jokes,
doing out-of-date songs and revamping the choreography. Cantor offers Shore for
the benefit as long as he can get to be the chair of the benefit committee,
whereupon he makes himself utterly hated by everyone else involved — and when,
seven hours before the benefit is supposed to start, he brings in a small
menagerie of zoo animals (including an elephant, a camel and a zebra) and
announces they’re going to be used in a number that until then no one else
connected with the show had the slightest idea even existed, the producers have
had enough. Meanwhile, the ingénue leads — aspiring singers Tommy Randolph
(Dennis Morgan) and Pat Nixon (Joan Leslie) — have been trying to get jobs, and
Randolph’s fly-by-night agent has tricked Cantor into signing a contract to use
Randolph on his show by making it look like he was simply asking for Cantor’s
autograph.

There’s a charming scene in “Gower Gulch” — actually the part of
Hollywood where the cheapest studios were located (including the companies that
made Westerns exclusively because they could be shot entirely outdoors and
therefore they didn’t need the expense of renting lights) but in this film depicted
as a residential community whose down-and-out denizens have built themselves al
fresco homes out of bits of old
movie sets — where Randolph and Nixon sing a duet and hold their own against
the comedic holocaust of Spike Jones and His City Slickers. There’s a third
person in Randolph’s and Nixon’s circle, Joe Simpson (Eddie Cantor), a bus
driver who does tours of the movie stars’ homes; he came to Hollywood to be a
serious dramatic actor but no one takes him seriously because of his strong
resemblance to Eddie Cantor. When Cantor (the real one) refuses to let Randolph
sing at the benefit, he, Nixon and Simpson hatch a plot to kidnap him —
executed by three Gower Gulch residents dressed as Indians — and have Simpson
impersonate him at the benefit. The benefit goes on as scheduled and without
Cantor’s unwanted changes, and the sequences of the big Warners stars
performing at it are intercut with some quite funny slapstick scenes involving
Cantor, the Indians, some dogs, maple syrup (he’s tied to a see-saw and the
maple syrup is poured accidentally on his shoes, and the dogs lick them off to
eat the syrup) and, when he escapes that peril, a psych ward in which he ends
up in which cold water hoses are turned on him (the “water cure” was a common
treatment for mental illness in 1943) and he’s prepped for a lobotomy.

When I
first saw this one the most attractive bits were the two songs by Warners’
superstars who otherwise never made musicals — Bette Davis’s jitterbug number
“They’re Either Too Young or Too Old” (lamenting that all the men her age were
serving in the war and all she had left to date were teenagers or senior
citizens — not surprisingly, Kitty Kallen sang this better on Jimmy Dorsey’s
hit record than Davis did this in the movie but her game willingness to be
flung around the set by real-life jitterbug champion Conrad Wiedell is
engaging; according to imdb.com, she really hurt her knee doing the number and
the limp and look of pain she gives as she exits the set and leans on a
lamppost to finish the number were for real) and Errol Flynn’s marvelous pub
number “That’s What You Jolly Well Get” (he’s supposed to be playing a Cockney
but his accent sounded more Aussie to me — Flynn was actually Australian but he
usually affected a quite convincing British accent in his films and only
rarely, as here, do his true origins come through) — though this time the songs
by people with reputations as singers seemed at least as good. Dinah Shore gets
to sing the title song in the opening of the film (depicting a typical Cantor
radio broadcast) and an even better one called “The Dreamer” later on (both
composed by Arthur Schwartz with lyrics by Frank Loesser — and while Loesser’s
output improved in quality when he started writing both music and words, these are still excellent songs of the
period). Ida Lupino’s appearance is as part of a trio doing a parody version of
“The Dreamer” later on — she’s co-starred with Olivia de Havilland (whose vocal
is dubbed by Lynn Martin, though Lupino did her own singing) and George Tobias,
and the best part of the number is the energetic dancing (sort of) these three
do to the song.

But the musical highlight of the movie is an elaborate number
supposedly set in Harlem (in a set built with so many angles and forced
perspective that Charles and I had the same thought at once: “The Harlem of
Dr. Caligari!”) called “Ice Cold Katy,”
about an African-American woman being pushed to hurry up and marry her
servicemember boyfriend already before he ships out; besides all the acrobatic
dancing and a surprisingly non-stupid role for Willie Best, it’s noteworthy
particularly for Hattie McDaniel’s booming vocal. (She hardly ever got to sing
in her films — though she was good enough to hold her own with Paul Robeson in
the duet “Ah Still Suits Me” in the 1936 Show Boat, and before she went to Hollywood she’d toured on
T.O.B.A. Black vaudeville bills with Bessie Smith — and I still think a Bessie Smith biopic starring McDaniel is
one of the great might-have-beens of cinema history.) Other Warners’ stars who
appear in the film include John Garfield (in the opening Cantor broadcast, in
which he nearly strangles Cantor twice while narrating his criminal career to a
parody version of “Blues in the Night” — in which the punchline is that, while
recalling what his mamma done tol’ him, he recalls that she’s the one who
turned him in to the cops!) and Humphrey Bogart, who actually got top billing
(they were going alphabetically rather than by role importance) but just did
one scene, in which he turns up in his Duke Mantee makeup, complete with three
days’ growth of beard, and tries to intimidate S. Z. Sakall with his best
“tough guy” manner — and can’t. “I hope my movie fans don’t find out about
this!” Bogie says as he exits — and I couldn’t help but joke, “I had a really
weird dream! I was making a picture about a guy who ran a bar in North Africa —
and that guy was playing my bartender!” Lasting a bit over two hours, Thank
Your Lucky Stars is a bit on the long side
but is also quite charming, and the three elements — the all-star numbers,
Eddie Cantor’s comeuppance (the fact that Cantor allowed himself to be cast
under his own name as such an S.O.B. is pretty remarkable in and of itself!)
and the love story — manage to mesh instead of clash.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

This morning I watched a Lifetime movie I’d timer-recorded
on Saturday: talhotblond — as you could
probably guess from that typography, it’s a story about the Internet (the
Lifetime promos for it and its imdb.com page both spell the title TalhotBlond, but the all-lower case spelling is the one that
appears on the actual opening credit) and, since this is Lifetime, particularly
about a sex-and-murder scandal revolving around the Internet. It’s actually
based on a true story, though all the character names have been changed except
for the male lead, Thomas Montgomery (Garret Dillahunt, a rather homely actor
it’s going to be difficult to cast but who’s just right for this part). Indeed,
a documentary about it, called talhotblond: (with the colon), was made in 2009 and directed by
Barbara Schroeder, who also posted her own synopsis of it to imdb.com: “This is
the true story of a love triangle that takes place entirely online. Lies lead
to murder in real life, as a teenage vixen (screen name ‘talhotblond’) lures
men into her web. Revealing a shocking true crime story that shows the
Internet’s power to unleash our most dangerous fantasies.”

This non-documentary version also had a woman director:
Courteney Cox, the star of the TV series Friends (a show I always avoided) and someone who always put me off because of
the pretentiousness of her name: “Courtney” is already bad enough and the
addition of the extra “e” makes it really crazy and silly. She actually does a good job here, turning in a
brilliant story of seduction and nailing both the atmospherics and the
characterizations. Thomas Montgomery starts the movie as a respected,
productive factory worker who is responsible to a fault to his wife Carol
(Laura San Giacomo, the female lead from sex, lies and videotape now turned into a surprisingly frumpy woman) and
their two teenage daughters. His only outlet is a monthly poker night with some
of his buddies from the factory, including his best friend Brian Barrett
(Brando Eaton), until one night when Brian says the other guys are signing up
for All Betz Off, an Internet site that runs an online poker game. Thomas logs
on to the family computer and during the game his attention is distracted by a
woman who logs on with the screen name “talhotblond” and asks for a private
online chat with him. She sends a photo of herself as an 18-year-old
bikini-clad blonde named Katie Brooks (Ashley Hinshaw) and the two are drawn
into an online affair. Thomas has picked the screen name “marinesniper” — which
he was, during the first Gulf War
in 1991 — and in order not to turn off his teen dream he sends her a
20-year-old head shot of him in uniform, calls himself “Tommy” and claims to be
about to deploy to Afghanistan.

As he gets deeper into the affair, he buys a
laptop of his own and spins more preposterous lies (he says he’s actually in Afghanistan and “national security” prevents him
from giving her more information about his location, and sometimes because of
duty he has to log off in a hurry). The relationship reaches its climax — in
both senses — when Thomas, who’s previously been shown as no longer able to get
it up with his wife, jacks off in front of his computer screen as Katie eggs
him on and the two chat the usual stupid “sexy” things people do when they’re
having cyber-sex. Meanwhile, his considerably younger, hotter and single friend
Brian has also started an online
affair with “talhotblond” and fallen hard for her, to the point of wanting to
marry her — as does Thomas as soon as he can get out of the minor little
inconvenience of his already being married. Midway through the story Carol,
who’s much less naïve about these matters than the typical Lifetime heroine,
opens Thomas’s laptop, guesses his password (“semperfi”) and sees the chat logs
between her husband and his online girlfriend, and she writes her a letter with
a photo of Thomas’s family explaining who and what he is and saying the “Tommy
Montgomery” she’s been flirting with online doesn’t exist. She also banishes
Thomas to the garage, and when he’s there one lonely night with his laptop
(it’s a surprise she didn’t confiscate it and have its hard drive wiped) he
figures, “A few hours of online poker wouldn’t hurt” — the classic cry of all
movie addicts that they can handle just one more … As it turns out, he’s
actually been blocked from the poker site but he can still reach “talhotblond”
for a chat — and she writes him about how much she’s been hurt by his lies, and
he pleads with her to resume their relationship. He also asks her if she’s indeed
dating Brian, and when she says yes, he gets jealous and angry, accuses her of
being a “whore” and says Brian is lying to her about himself — “what about ur
lies?” she types back, with some justice — and he runs through women like
Kleenex and if she gets involved with him she’ll regret it.

Then, during a
lunch break at work, Thomas confronts Brian in the locker room and the two get
into a fight that’s broken up by the foreman (Brett Rice), who tells Thomas
that he’s going to let it slide this time but between the fight and the
slacking off of his work performance, any more trouble and he’s going to have
to fire him. The foreman tells Thomas to take the rest of the day (it’s Friday)
off and do something to calm down over the weekend. Instead Thomas gets out his
old Marine sniper rifle, ambushes Brian in the parking lot of the factory that
night, and shoots him dead. Then he impulsively takes Carol and the family on a
camping trip and he and Carol actually successfully have sex (nothing like
killing your best friend over an online girlfriend neither of you have met to
get the old juices going!). Only the police figure out the crime incredibly
quickly and when the Montgomerys return from the camping trip, they’re camped
outside the family home waiting to arrest Thomas whenever he shows up — and
eventually the cops (one of whom has a nasal voice so reminiscent of Peter Falk’s one thinks Columbo is working the case!) get him to confess. In a big
surprise twist at the end, it turns out “talhotblond” is really Beth Brooks (Molly Hagan), a frump who, like Thomas, has
been lying about her age on the Internet and using photos of her daughter to lure men into thinking she’s young and hot. We
see the image of Katie Brooks being asked by the cops if she knows anything
about Brian Barrett or Thomas Montgomery, and saying no both times, twice, and the first time we assume she’s lying but the
second time we know she’s telling the truth: Beth had just taken photos of
Katie lying on a chaise longue in a bikini and used them as the images of
“talhotblond” online. “You think you’re the only one who ever lied on the
Internet?” one of the cops tells Thomas, who has to deal with the fact that he
killed his best friend over a fantasy woman neither of them actually met and who didn’t really exist.

Mostly well-written (except for that corny “one’s too many and a hundred’s not
enough” scene) by Trent Haaga, talhotblond is a quite exciting thriller that’s also well made in its depiction of
the proletarian trap Thomas is in at the beginning of the movie (he and his
wife both work long hours on their jobs, they never see each other, his job is
dull routine and when he’s forced to make dinner for the kids because his wife
is working late, his kids bitch about its high salt and fat content) and how
easily he gets sucked into the online fantasy “talhotblond” is offering him —
“you make me feel like a man again,” he writes her in one of her chat sessions.
It’s not a brilliant movie but it is
a quite well-done one, and the actors playing Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery are
superbly chosen — not downright ugly but not exactly hot and gorgeous either —
and they act well and make the characters’ discombobulated emotions credible.
Ultimately the whole idea that two people could get so possessive over a woman
they’d never met in person that one would kill the other over her in a fit of
jealous rage (enough of one that Thomas got convicted of first-degree
manslaughter instead of murder — presumably a plea bargain but also a
reflection of the extenuating circumstances) — and that the real person would
prove to be someone totally different from the one they were fantasizing about
(and jacking off to her pics!) — is the most chilling aspect of this story; it
makes me curious to see Barbara Schroeder’s documentary and get more of the
real story, and at the same time I’m impressed with this production and
particularly the sensitivity of the casting and the skill of Cox’s direction.

The film was Cowboy from
Brooklyn, a 1938 Warner Bros.
release from the dog days of Dick Powell’s status as a Warners contract player.
He starts the film as a hobo, Elly Jordan (an oddly “feminine” name for a Dick
Powell character!), with a growth of beard that makes him look more like the
Dick Powell who played Philip Marlowe than the one who was a Warners musical
star, who’s rehearsing in a boxcar with his band “The Three Sharps” (himself on
vocal and guitar, Candy Candido on novelty vocals and bass, and Harry Barris —
one of the original three Rhythm Boys with Bing Crosby and Al Rinker — on
backing vocals and piano). The workers on the train are alerted by the sound
and throw The Three Sharps off the train, along with their instruments —
including the piano, which wasn’t actually theirs but one the train was shipping
that they just opened up and took advantage of. They’re thrown off in Cody,
Wyoming near the dude ranch owned by Pop and Ma Hardy (Granville Bates and Emma
Dunn) but really run by their daughter Jane (Priscilla Lane).

Elly pleads with
her for some food and says he’s willing to work for it; she doesn’t have any
extra work on the ranch, but when he says he’s with two other people and
they’re a musical band, she puts them to work entertaining at the nightly
camp-outs — thereby pissing off her boyfriend Sam Thorne (Dick Foran), who also
claims to be a singer-guitarist but merely croaks an off-key version of “Home
on the Range.” (Foran actually had a nice, if not great, voice, and four years later he got to do
essentially the same plot in Ride ’Em, Cowboy with Abbott and Costello, in which he got to play the urban tenderfoot passed off as a
cowboy singer that Powell is playing here.) Elly accepts even though he’s
deathly afraid of animals — all animals; he cowers in fear at seeing a rabbit emerge from a burrow hole
(“He’s seen Night of the Lepus,” I joked) and flees in terror from a mule in what turns out to be a
surprisingly creative (especially for a film whose official director was the
hacky Lloyd Bacon) Keatonesque slapstick scene staged in longshot, with Dick
Powell in front, the mule behind him, and Priscilla Lane on horseback behind him until she falls off and he gets to rescue and
meet-cute her. Things go in this vein for 25 minutes until theatrical producer
Roy Chadwick (Pat O’Brien) and his publicity guy/chauffeur Pat Dunn (Ronald
Reagan, in his second year in the movie business; this was only his sixth film)
show up, hear Elly’s voice and immediately sign him up. The only catch is that
he has to use the name “Wyoming Steve Gibson” and pass as a real Westerner, and
the scene in which Jane Hardy coaches him to do that (including a warning
always to use the word “reckon” when he means “think”) is one of the best in
the film. “Gibson” becomes a big in-person and radio star in New York until
Thorne crashes an amateur-hour show and, when he’s gonged off, hogs the mike
and announces to the city and the world that “Gibson” is a no-good fake who
stole his gal.

Eventually “Gibson” has to overcome his fear of animals — which
he does by being hypnotized by an entertainer from the dude ranch, Professor
Landis (James Stephenson), though as a side effect two other people (including
Mr. Urban himself, Pat O’Brien!) are also hypnotized into thinking they’re Wyoming Steve Gibson — and he enters the rodeo at Madison Square
Garden, wins a big event, sets a world’s record in something or other (not
being a big rodeo fan I didn’t remember what) and ends up with Jane. Cowboy
from Brooklyn is considerably funnier
than most of Dick Powell’s musicals; based on an old play called Howdy,
Stranger by Louis Pelletier and
Robert Sloane, it was adapted by Earl Baldwin in a light, campy way that
genuinely works on screen — though the songs are pretty simple, not up to the
best work of Richard Whiting (Margaret Whiting’s father), Harry Warren and
Johnny Mercer, awfully high-powered talents to come up with things with titles
like “Cowboy from Brooklyn,” “Howdy, Stranger” and “Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride.”

Last night Charles and I watched a movie — sort of: it was a
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode
based on a 1964 Italian film called Hercules Against the Moon Men, though in the original Italian version the
strongman star was actually playing a long-lived local character named Maciste,
who had begun his reign over cheap Italian movies in 1912 and was still going
strong as a box-office attraction into the 1960’s (sort of like Tarzan in the
U.S.). But the U.S. distributors for this excessively boring movie decided
that, as long as they were dubbing it into English anyway, they would change
the name of the musclebound lead from Maciste to Hercules to tie it in with the
fantastically successful Joseph E. Levine U.S. releases of the Italian cheapies
Hercules and Hercules
Unchained (both also parodied on MST3K). I had a hard time staying awake through this one —
this was one of those bad movies which the MST3K crew seem to have picked because its badness
manifested itself mostly as boredom — and from what I did see it looked like a
standard-issue action-adventure science-fiction movie in which
Maciste/Hercules/whatever his name was (played by an Italian actor named Sergio
Ciani who was billed as “Alan Steel,” which sounds like a porn alias to me) has
to fight a race of baddies who buried deep into the bowels of the earth (if
they were indeed from the moon, as the title and the official synopsis stated,
it wasn’t clear how they got there, though I think it was supposed to be that they took advantage of a
convenient volcanic eruption to burrow into the earth) near the town of Samar,
from which they demand a periodic sacrifice of the town’s children, who are
marched into the leftover volcanic opening and done away with in some
unmentioned (and undepicted) but presumably horrible fashion. Samara (Jany Clair),
the queen of Samar, has apparently cut a deal with the Moon Men so she can be
given eternal youth by being plugged into some kind of energy-transference
machine so she can suck out the energy of her twin sister — which seems to work
by intertwining their hair.

Of course it all leads up to a giant confrontation
scene between Hercules/Maciste and the baddies, who look like animate rocks
(and the costuming and effects work on them is so tacky one can’t help but
remember how well a similar effect was done with the Clay People in Flash
Gordon’s Trip to Mars in the 1930’s —
albeit the Clay People were actually mostly on the side of good) and vastly
outnumber Our Hero. Of course, since this is a movie, none of that matters:
he’s able to knock down the rock men and turn them into ordinary, non-animate
rocks. But what really makes this
an especially terrible movie is that for some reason director Giacomo
Gentiluomo (“gentleman”) — who, according to a “trivia” note on imdb.com, quit
the movie business after this film and became a painter — and writers Arpad
DeRiso, Angelo Sangermano, and Nino Scolaro, decided to stage the final
confrontation against the backdrop of a sandstorm that engulfs the entrance to
the Moon Men’s cave and forces Hercules, his on-screen girlfriend and the other
good guys to make their way to the Moon Men’s cave through an impenetrable goop
that’s supposed to represent blowing sand and just makes it virtually
impossible to tell what’s going on. For some reason the MST3K crew decided — rare for them — to telegraph the
ending; in the setup sequences depicting the “invention exchange” between
Satellite of Love denizens Joel Robinson (Joel Hodgson) and his robots Crow
(Trace Beaulieu), Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) and Gypsy (Jim Mallon) on one side and
the evil Dr. Clayton Forrester (also Trace Beaulieu) and his sidekick TV Frank
(Frank Conniff) on the other, Dr. Forrester is shown scooping through a bowl
full of sand and saying, “Sandstorm … sandstorm.” Not that it mattered much: Hercules
Against the Moon Men showed an occasional
shot of visual elegance (perhaps Gentiluomo did considerably better when he
abandoned filmmaking for static art, at which this film suggests he would have
been considerably more talented) and Alan Steel was nice to look at even
though, as one of the MST3K crew
commented, he made you miss the acting chops of Steve Reeves.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

I ran one of the items I’d
recorded recently from Lifetime: Murder in Greenwich, a 2002 movie that was produced either for
theatrical release or (more likely) premium pay cable because there were
audible blips in the soundtrack — mostly of the “God-” from “Goddamn” and the
“-hole” from “asshole.” When I saw this in the schedule and noted that
Christopher Meloni was the star I was hoping this would be his first project
since leaving Law and Order: Special Victims Unit — but no-o-o-o-o, it was actually filmed in 2002 (when he’d been
doing SVU for only three seasons)
and it once again cast him as a cop, albeit a retired and somewhat disgraced
one. Murder in Greenwich was
produced by Dominick Dunne — a specialist in real-life crime books and TV shows
(though he’s mostly done documentaries rather than dramatizations like this) —
directed by Tom McLoughlin (who did Friday the 13th: Jason Lives,
Part VI in 1986, did a Friday the 13th TV series for one year thereafter and
since has mostly done TV-movies, including those kinky Patricia Cornwell
productions At Risk and The
Front from 2010) from a script
by David Erickson based on the book of the same title by Mark Fuhrman, the
infamous L.A. police detective whose role in the O. J. Simpson case helped O.
J. get free. I suppose if anybody playing Mark Fuhrman could get me to like the guy — whose reputation is
a major part of Erickson’s script: when he’s met by one of the Greenwich,
Connecticut townspeople who recites all the public criticism of Fuhrman he can
think of to his face, he replies in that famous Meloni deadpan, “You forgot
genocidal racist.” About the only concessions Meloni and the filmmakers make to
“Fuhrmanicity” is having him wear blue jeans rather than Armani suits through
most of the show (though McLoughlin gives us way too few of the mid-shots I was
hoping for that would flash Meloni’s basket on screen) and giving him an
ill-fitting wig instead of that famous receding hairline he’s shown on SVU and his irregular appearances in other things
during his 12-year run on the series.

The story? Oh, the story! It was based on the murder of 15-year-old Martha
Moxley (Maggie Grace) in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1975 on the day before
Hallowe’en — and the eventual attribution of it to her neighbor Michael Skakel
(Jon Foster), younger brother of Tommy Skakel (Toby Moore) and several other
Skakels. The Skakels were referred to as “Kennedys” in most of the publicity
surrounding the trial that took place after Fuhrman’s book forced the state of
Connecticut to reopen the case, mainly because Robert Kennedy’s wife Ethel was
a Skakel, and I must say I avoided most of the tabloid attention at the time,
mainly because the Right-wing media were seizing on the case to say that all
Kennedys were psychopathic murderers, and therefore by extension all liberals were psychopathic murderers — and between that and
the fact that the man who reopened the case was the racist cop from hell in the
O. J. case (I have no doubt that O. J. was guilty as charged; I also have no
doubt that Fuhrman deliberately tried to frame him and got caught at it — the
two propositions are not mutually exclusive) I saw the whole affair as yet
another Right-wing plot to make a famous progressive family and, by extension,
the entire Left look bad. Erickson makes his movie move on two tracks at once,
showing flashbacks to Martha Moxley alive and her relationship with the
Skakels, and how the Skakels got screwed up (at one point Martha, who in
Erickson’s script is literally narrating from beyond the grave — a great movie, Sunset Boulevard, used that device, and so did a lousy one, Scared
to Death, and frankly this one is
closer to Scared to Death than Sunset Boulevard! — compares their home to Lord of the Flies, because their mom is dead and their dad Rushton,
played by Peter Rowley, is giving them virtually no supervision) while at the
same time intercutting between those and scenes taking place in the (2002)
present.

Mark Fuhrman is described as an interloper elbowing his way into a
community already closed to outsiders before the murder happened and even more
suspicious of a controversial cop coming in and messing around in the worst
thing that ever happened there. If the townspeople don’t go quite as far as the famous scene in Nothing Sacred in which a small boy bites the interloping reporter
on the leg, they get pretty close — and one of the most telling bits is when
Fuhrman traces one of the previous suspects, who’s now working in an office,
and his secretary asks for her lunch break early because she’s Black and
doesn’t want to be in the presence of such a racist creep. Murder in
Greenwich had the potential to be
better than it is but Erickson and director McLoughlin kept going for the
easiest ways out, turning Mark Fuhrman into a slightly less bald version of
Elliot Stabler, a cop hated for being too good instead of screwing up and one who would
ultimately win the day. The film also touches on the ability of rich people to
cover up their misdeeds — though that, too, is something Law and Order routinely did better — and I’m afraid I can’t hate
the Skakels as much as this script tells me I should if only because of that
nasty history of the Republicans and their talk-radio propagandists using this
case to argue that all Democrats are psychopathic killers and not to be
trusted, while all Republicans are fair, upstanding Americans.

Next to Meloni,
by far the most interesting actor in the piece is Toby Moore, a hot-looking
young man (by comparison Jon Foster looks like a total nerd, which actually
becomes key to the plot — Fuhrman’s solution to the case is that Michael Skakel
killed Martha Moxley because he thought his older, hotter, sexier brother had
seduced her and Michael was furious with her for giving herself to him) who’d
actually be quite good casting in a biopic of Mick Jagger: he’s got the right
combination of androgyny and butchness (and the famous gaping mouth) to play
the younger Jagger on screen. Murder in Greenwich has its nice moments, mostly from its two
charismatic male stars, but the writing is clunky and the relationship between
Fuhrman and the cop-turned-chauffeur who worked the case originally in 1975 and
ultimately helps him solve it is yet another potentially interesting dramatic
theme Erickson and McLoughlin dance around instead of tackling head-on.
Ultimately it’s just another TV policier without the passion, intensity and edgy writing of Law and Order:
Special Victims Unit.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Say what you
will about Diversionary Theatre, you never quite know what to expect from them.
Their latest production, Harmony, Kansas,
is an original musical — that’s something of a surprise right there — set in
the Kansas flatlands and the town of Shiloh, described on the ePodunk.com Web
site as “a township in Neosho County … [whose] population, at the time of the
2000 census, was 297.” For those Queers whose association with Kansas is as the
place Dorothy Gale was magically whisked out of by a cyclone that took her to
Oz, Harmony, Kansas will be a
jolting confirmation that we are, indeed, everywhere — even in the middle of
the Kansas wheat country where virtually everyone is a farmer and there are
virtually no opportunities to meet each other.

Written (book
and lyrics) by Bill Nelson with music by Anna K. Jacobs, Harmony, Kansas centers around Heath (Jacob Caltrider), a Wisconsin
native whose sex-fueled wanderlust cost his family their farm and who’s trying
to make it right by building a spread in Kansas equal in size to the one he
lost in Wisconsin. Either one or two and one-half years earlier — Nelson’s book
is a bit unclear on the timeline — Heath met a man named Julian (Tom Zohar) in
Kansas City (there are actually two Kansas Cities, but Julian is presumably
from the larger and much more cosmopolitan one in Missouri rather than the one
across the state line in Kansas), started a relationship with him and
ultimately got him to move back with him to his farm.

There’s just one
problem: Julian remains a city boy at heart, painfully yearning for the company
of other people in general and other Gay men in particular. He’s found at least
some of what he’s looking for in an informal singing group that meets every
Monday night in Shiloh. The organizer is Wylie (John Whitley) and the other
members include middle-aged bear type Fuzz (Bill Nolte); rather prissy homebody
Darrell (Tony Houck) — whose partner Pete (whom we never see as an on-stage
character) is out of town selling horses — Ken (Anthony Methvin), with whom
Darrell has drifted into an affair; and 16-year-old D. J. (Dylan Hoffinger),
who’s taking out his dual frustrations over being Queer and under the age of
consent out on animals he puts in freezers or blows up with homemade bombs.

The plot of Harmony,
Kansas deals with Julian’s desperate
attempts to get Heath to join him in the singing group — whose members have
informally nicknamed it “The Poker Night” because that’s what they tell anybody
else who asks what they’re doing on those Monday nights — and the struggles of
the various members to maintain their integrity as people against the
relentless pressure on them to remain closeted. The first half is generally
campy and a bit silly — though at least Nelson resists the temptation to turn
the relationship of Heath and Julian into Green Acres, the Gay version.

Indeed, their
cultural conflicts and the peculiar combination of love and guilt in the
relationship between Darrell and Ken are presented dramatically and with
genuine pathos, even though sometimes it seems as if Nelson has inverted the
formula of “comic relief” by creating those moments as “serious relief” from
the campy humor. At one point Darrell even gets miffed that Julian has brought
snacks for the group and sings a song called “I Bring the Snacks.”

The second half
gets a good deal more serious as the conflicts between Heath and Julian get
more pointed, the triangle between Darrell, Ken and the unseen Pete becomes
harder to maintain, and Wylie gradually wants to raise the profile of the
singing group and have it perform in public. Though all the onstage characters are Gay men, Nelson does a
superb job of dramatizing the closet and its corrosive effects on these men’s
self-esteem, as well as their abject fear of “outing” themselves by appearing
on a local stage with all their neighbors watching. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” may
be history as far as the U.S. military is concerned, but at least as depicted
here it’s still very much a part of life on the Kansas plains.

When Julian
protests that their fellow farmers will have noticed that they are two men
living together and therefore have intuited that they’re a Gay couple, Heath
protests that he needs to maintain their respect (especially since he’s
depending on them for the bank loan he needs to expand his farm) and therefore
they can’t do anything that might be read as “flaunting.” Darrell is in an even
worse pickle because the farm he lives on is owned by Pete’s family, and they
have the power to throw him out and render him homeless any time they choose.

Harmony,
Kansas gets darker and more emotionally
intense as it goes on, and though it reaches an affirmative climax it gets
there through a deus ex machina
device of such bone-crushing obviousness one gets the impression that Nelson
missed the class session of Playwriting 101 that would have taught him not to
do that. Despite that miscalculation, though, it remains emotionally intense
(this viewer cried!) and is superlatively staged by director James Vasquez and
Diversionary’s technical crew, and impeccably acted by the cast.

Though Jacob
Caltrider stands out — he’s the hottest man in the cast (when one of the other
characters makes a joke about how well he fills out his Wranglers, virtually
every Gay man in the audience — and most of the straight women as well — will
no doubt agree!), he’s the most charismatic actor and he’s also got the
strongest singing voice — Harmony, Kansas
is really an ensemble piece. Tom Zohar gets a bit whiny sometimes as Julian,
and John Whitley and Tony Houck don’t always maintain the right balance between
their characters’ queeny exteriors and their emotion-ridden interiors, but
Anthony Methvin is a powerful stage presence as the tortured Ken and Dylan Hoffinger
is dynamic as the frustrated D.J.

The best part of
Harmony, Kansas is the formidable vocal
blend its actors have achieved. Adam Wachter, who conducts the show, plays the
piano accompaniment (supported by Peggy Johnston on bass) and is responsible for
the arrangements, deserves credit for rehearsing the actors and training them
to become a first-rate singing group. The few times they’re less than perfect —
like on the pathetic (in the negative sense) “Welcome Song” Wylie writes to
welcome Heath to the group — are clearly intentional. Indeed, it might be nice
to see these actors stay together and keep singing after the run of Harmony,
Kansas ends on July 22; they’re good enough
to sing the great standard songs their 1950’s harmonies were made for. (There’s
one point during the musical in which Nelson’s dialogue seems to be setting up
a song cue for “Over the Rainbow” — and it seems likely the only reason he and
Jacobs didn’t go there was the nightmarish trouble and expense of securing the
rights.)

Harmony,
Kansas is produced with Diversionary’s
usual technical aplomb. Sean Fanning’s unit set is reasonably credible as both
farm country and living room, and only when we’re asked to believe that a crude
stack of three chairs is a mechanical bull does it tax credibility. Shirley
Pierson’s costumes are appropriate enough — especially D. J.’s overalls and
Fuzz’s belt buckle, which tell us more than we need to know about them — and
Michelle Carron’s lighting design is a bit on the autumnal side but still lets
us see what’s going on. Overall, it’s a nice, uplifting evening at the theatre,
a piece that fulfills the musical conventions (and is helped by being about people who sing!) despite some glitches in the
dramatic construction which Nelson may well fix for subsequent productions.

Harmony,
Kansas runs through Sunday, July 22 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Boulevard in
University Heights. Previews run through June 22 and the official opening is on
Saturday, June 23. Performances are 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. and 2 p.m. Sun. Special
performances occur Wed., June 20 and Mon., July 9. For tickets and other
information, call (619) 220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org

Sunday, June 17, 2012

The film was Hi-De-Ho, the third and last film Cab Calloway made with
his famous trademark phrase in the title: the other two were band shorts, one
called Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho from Paramount in 1934 (a quite remarkable 10-minute movie in which Cab
is having an affair with the wife of a Pullman porter; the plot is that hubby
has given wifey a radio so she can listen to Calloway’s live broadcasts from
the Cotton Club, only when he comes home unexpectedly while she’s entertaining
Cab, he hides out in another room and starts singing so she can pass off the
sound of his voice as a broadcast she’s listening to on the fabulous new radio
her husband brought her) and one called simply Hi De Ho (no hyphens between the words) from Warners in 1937
(an even weirder one described by an imdb.com reviewer with the screen name
“Spuzzlightyear” thusly: “While I love Cab Calloway, I'm really surprised they cast him in a role that is so dark, he regularly beats up his girlfriend, plays seedy
clubs, and soon, has hits on his life set up by his vengeful girlfriend!
Fortunately, his professional life is on the upswing, with his agent getting
him out of seedy clubs and into the bigtime. Soon, after the hit on his life
fails, and his nasty girl is out of the way, his agent takes over and soon Cab
is the hit of the world!” My own notes on it similarly described it as “a
surprisingly dark movie … far removed from the exuberance of the title … in
which Calloway, a young Black blade who dreams of music stardom while his more
down-to-earth mother works away at the washtub, visits a fortuneteller and sees
a whole series of visions of his future in her tea leaves — one of which is set
to a song called ‘Frisco Flo’ which is surprisingly moody and dark for
Calloway, and is shot by director Roy Mack in proto-noir fashion — only an exuberant number at the very end
gives us the Cab Calloway we all know and love!”).

The 1947 Hi-De-Ho was made by a New York-based studio called “All
American” and features Jeni Le Gon, the great Black dancer who was featured
with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Thomas “Fats” Waller in the great “Living in
a Great Big Way” number that ends RKO’s otherwise workmanlike 1935 musical Hooray
for Love — only in one of the most
bizarre decisions ever made by a producer (E. M. Glucksman), director (Josh
Binney) and writer (Hal Seeger), not only does Le Gon not get a chance to dance
but the other female lead, Ida James, doesn’t get a chance to sing even though
she had a superb voice (as anyone who’s seen her “Soundie” with Nat “King” Cole
on “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” will know; she has absolutely no trouble
keeping up with him vocally and if she’d been properly promoted as a recording
artist, she’d have given Dinah Washington a run for her money). The plot, what
there is of it, features James as Nettie, a woman who’s signed to manage
Calloway (who, like Desi Arnaz on the I Love Lucy series, is an internationally famous bandleader in
real life portraying a small-timer stuck in tiny clubs), arousing the jealousy
of Minnie (Le Gon), Calloway’s girlfriend — whom he slaps so hard in the
opening scene he literally knocks her down. Nettie books Calloway an audition
for the owners of the Little Jive Club (he plays the audition with a cut-down
personnel featuring a clearly recognizable Jonah Jones on trumpet) and he gets
the job, but he’s such a success he arouses the opposition of gangster Boss
Mason (George Wiltshire) and his sidekick Mo the Mouse (James Dunmore), who own
the nightclub across the street at which Minnie sings … and whose business has
nosedived big-time once Cab Calloway was playing at the Little Jive.

In a
jealous snit, Minnie approaches Boss Mason to arrange to have Calloway killed,
but when Mo (who’s so inept he makes one think he’s the survivor of an attempt
to do a Black version of the Three Stooges) actually fires the gun, Minnie
steps in the path of the bullet and takes the shot instead. We assume she dies
— we never see her again — and the remaining half-hour of this 64-minute film
(it was originally released at 72 minutes and featured Black comedian Dusty
Fletcher doing his famous “Open the Door, Richard” routine, which he wrote and
recorded for National, the predecessor company to Atlantic, only Jack McVea’s
band beat him to the hit with their record for the short-lived Black &
White label, but Fletcher’s number didn’t appear in the shorter reissue version
we were watching from the Mill Creek Entertainment 20 Classic Movie Musicals boxed set) is simply a sequence of Calloway’s band
(brought back up to full big-band size) at the Little Jive, mostly playing
instrumentals backing up dance acts (notably the surprisingly heavy-set but
still quite agile Paris Sisters) but sometimes featuring Cab’s vocals, notably
a version of “St. James Infirmary” in which Calloway performs in a “tramp”
getup that looks like Red Skelton’s Freddie Freeloader with a hint of Chaplin
around the edges — and in which his voice projects the darkness of the lyrics
(it is a song about a man
contemplating his own death, after all!) surprisingly effectively for anyone
who thinks of Calloway as just the guy who jumped up and down, shook his
heavily “processed” hair and screamed that he was the hi-de-ho man, that’s me!

Calloway didn’t do quite as much jumping as he had in his 1930’s films but he
was still in excellent command of his body and his voice was in great shape —
though quite frankly I liked him better in the more intimate songs, the ones at
slower tempi with lyrics full of the sly wit of pieces like “Hey Now, Hey Now.”
As a movie this isn’t much; as a musical it would have been a lot stronger if
they’d cut some of the dance acts and given Ida James a chance to sing with the
Calloway band; but as a showcase for Calloway it’s superb and well worth
watching. It also helps that producer Glucksman had access to better camera
equipment than most earlier race-movie producers did — and, even more
importantly, better sound equipment: the lyrics Calloway is singing are actually understandable
instead of a morass of sonic sludge, and though Calloway had long since lost
the two best jazz soloists he ever had (tenor saxophonist Leon “Chu” Berry, who
was killed in an auto accident in 1941; and trumpeter John “Dizzy” Gillespie,
whom he fired that same year as the result of a misunderstanding in which
bassist Milt Hinton threw a spitball at Cab and Cab blamed Dizzy) he still led
an excellent band that played great swing instrumentals as well as playing
solid, driving beats behind Cab’s vocals that showcased him at his best.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Last night Charles and I spent the evening “in”
watching a peculiar spectacle on TV: Nik Wallenda’s tightrope walk across
Niagara Falls. I had seen this promoted the night before on ABC-TV’s Nightline program, in which it followed a story about silly
stunts young people are involved in — including rolling themselves off rooftops
in plastic trash barrels, “car surfing” (standing on top of a car and trying to
hold on while the car is driven around ordinary streets), the “cinnamon
challenge” (swallowing a spoonful of cinnamon and trying to hold it in your
mouth for 60 seconds — apparently almost nobody can do it and what usually
happens is you end up coughing up a great cloud of cinnamon dust) and other
idiotic stunts that are becoming more popular because their practitioners have
themselves filmed and the resulting videos are posted on the Internet, where
other people can learn about these potentially dangerous pastimes and try them
out themselves. (One teenage woman was shown with her head encased in a bizarre
white helmet which she apparently has to wear 24/7 because she took a fall
while “car surfing” and great chunks of her skull simply broke off; the purpose
of the headdress is to hold the artificial replacement pieces in place until
the whole thing heals.) It was hard to tell from the Nightline show why the teenagers who shoot each other doing
these preposterous stunts deserved opprobrium for their idiocy while Nik
Wallenda deserved acknowledgment as a hero for something even crazier — walking
across Niagara Falls on a tightrope, which according to the Nightline program he would be the first to do.

Not so, said
Charles: a Frenchman named Charles Blondin (his true name was Jean-François
Gravelet, and he was mentioned by that name in the Los
Angeles Times article announcing that
Wallenda was going to do this, which Charles said would be like writing about
Harry Houdini but using only his given
name, Erich Weiss) had done a walk across Niagara Falls — indeed, he’d done it
so many times it practically became a regular entertainment at the site.
According to Blondin’s Wikipedia page, “He especially owed his celebrity and
fortune to his idea of crossing the Niagara Falls
gorge on a tightrope, 1100 feet (335 m) long, 3¼ inches in diameter, 160
feet (50 m) above the water. This he accomplished, first on 30 June 1859,
a number of times, always with different theatric variations: blindfolded, in a
sack, trundling a wheelbarrow, on stilts, carrying a man (his manager, Harry
Colcord) on his back, sitting down midway while he cooked and ate an omelet and
standing on a chair with only one chair leg on the rope.” But in 1896 both the
U.S. and Canadian governments passed laws forbidding any more daredevil
tightrope walks across the falls, and Wallenda had to spend three years just
lobbying both governments either to repeal the laws or at least to set them
aside for him. (It wasn’t clear which.)

ABC inflated this stunt to a three-hour
program (the actual walk took just a shade over 25 minutes) including footage
from famous daredevil stunts throughout history (or at least ones for which
film existed, which basically meant everything from Evel Knievel on — the
rocket on which Knievel tried to leap the Snake River Gorge was shown, though
as I recall the stunt was a fizzle: Knievel neither made it nor died, and quite
frankly those were set up in the pre-event publicity as the only two
dramatically acceptable outcomes; instead he parachuted into the gorge, rather
anticlimactically) and backstory on the Wallenda family, which apparently has
been doing this sort of thing for seven generations (plus another one to come:
Nik Wallenda met his wife while she was performing as an acrobat at the same
circus that employed him, and they have two kids and both of them are doing practice tightrope walks in their
backyard), including Nik’s legendary grandfather, Karl Wallenda. I remember
first hearing about the Wallendas in 1962 when Life magazine showed pictures of the horrible accident in which
the Flying Wallendas’ seven-person pyramid on a tightrope collapsed; two
Wallendas were killed, a third (Karl’s son) was permanently paralyzed, and Karl
himself signed out of the hospital the next day, totally against medical advice
and with two broken bones, because he felt he had to do his next performance. Nik Wallenda is a quite
attractive, personable blond man (the sort of athletics he’s involved in means
he needs to be in excellent physical shape but can’t let himself get too
muscular — unnecessary muscles mean extra weight and make it harder to maneuver
in the straight line of a tightrope walk).

The publicity mentioned that ABC’s
conditions for telecasting the event included that Wallenda must wear a tether
— a sort of harness between his body and the rope that was supposed to snag him
in case he fell, though he claimed the tether was making the stunt harder, not safer, since he’d never used one and it was throwing
off his balance. In the event, Wallenda had to contend with the mist from the
falls (apparently the main difference between him and Blondin was he was
tightroping not only across the Niagara Falls gorge but over the falls
themselves, thereby having to contend with spray, mist and water on his
tightrope — he practiced for these conditions by having his practice rope
sprayed with a firehose and a wind machine aimed at him but still said
afterwards that the real winds from the Falls’ air currents were a lot harder
than anything he’d simulated during his practices), water on his rope and the
overall atmosphere of the stunt, which included him being wired for sound and
occasionally answering a few interview questions during the walk. At one point
he said he was praying to Jesus the whole way — and I couldn’t help but note
the irony that Wallenda was 33 years old, the generally accepted figure for
Jesus’s age when he was crucified. It was a fascinating program; for all the
hucksterism it was still a man pushing himself to his limits and doing an
heroic thing, showing off what a person can achieve if they just put both their
body and their mind to it and have this extraordinary level of commitment.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

For our “feature” last night I showed Charles something, if
not completely, at least rather different: Elvis Costello and the Imposters’
live album (recorded May 12, 2011 at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, a
surprisingly intimate venue for someone who’s still enough of a star that one
would think he could fill a bigger space) called The Return of the
Spectacular Spinning Songbook. Costello’s
record label, Universal Music, released this in three formats — as a CD, a DVD
and a deluxe package that combined both. Naturally, I got the deluxe package
that combined both, and though I hadn’t played the CD version (and since CD’s
have less playing time than DVD’s I suspected — correctly — that it didn’t
contain the complete concert), I wanted to share the DVD with Charles since
he’d also been a Costello fan “in the day,” though I suspect not as much as I
was. I remember Elvis Costello as one of those artists — along with Bob Dylan
and David Bowie — whom I didn’t just like, but from the moment I heard a song by them I was convinced that they
were the coming voice in music,
the voice that would change the art form forever and dominate it in their time.
It seems odd at this stage to be treating Elvis Costello as a nostalgia act,
especially since (like Bruce Springsteen) he’s done as much as possible to
avoid being pigeonholed that way, recording different kinds of music with
different ensembles (among his on-the-record collaborators are mezzo-soprano
Anne Sofie van Otter, a string quartet, Burt Bacharach and the Dirty Dozen
Brass Band of New Orleans) and sometimes going on tour with one of his
alternate bands. The Imposters are three-fourths of the original Attractions
(Elvis Costello on vocals and guitar, Steve Nieve on keyboards, and Pete Thomas
on drums), but with a different bassist, Davey Faragher, since the original
one, Bruce Thomas, apparently quit in a hissy-fit over royalties allegedly
promised but not paid. The “Spectacular Spinning Songbook” is a concept Elvis
Costello first toured with in the late 1980’s in which he took along a giant wheel-of-fortune
spinner with the names of songs from his catalogue in the slots; he would
invite people from the audience to spin the wheel and then he and the band
would play whatever song came up.

The promotion around this concept, both in
the 1980’s and more recently, made it seem as if Costello were making up his
entire set list from random spins of the wheel, but in fact all he did was play
three or four randomly determined songs and plug them into what was otherwise a
pretty normally predetermined set list. One of the quirky things was how much
the concept hearkened back to the forms of show business common in the early
1900’s — the DVD came with an optional introduction with Elvis, dressed in a
top hat and tails and carrying a cane, explained (in his “Napoleon Dynamite”) persona the concept in such a stylized fashion it began to
seem like The Imaginarium of Elvis Costello. He would put on this get-up during the show
whenever he invited someone from the audience to spin the wheel and thereby
sort-of pick the next song. The result was actually a fairly normal Elvis
Costello concert video, not as blisteringly intense as some of the live
recordings of him that exist from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s (especially
the Washington, D.C. concert from the This Year’s Model tour, which remains the best Costello live recording
I’ve ever heard) but comfortable: he’s stouter than he was in the late 1970’s
(aren’t we all?) but he’s still an energetic performer and he’s still good not
only at writing songs but at playing the intensity of his music against his
nerd-like public persona. And the
accoutrements with which he surrounded this performance — the spinning wheel
(the band even accompanied the wheel-of-fortune segments with an instrumental
version of the Blood, Sweat and Tears song “Spinning Wheel,” a reference you’d really have to be up on late 1960’s/early 1970’s trivia to
get) and the cage with go-go dancers doing their thing while the band played —
added to the appeal and projected the image of a basically dorky guy trying to
be a “showman.”

At least two of the volunteers were named Alison — a name to
conjure with among Costello fans because one of his most beautiful early
ballads was named “Alison” — one Alison spun the wheel and another one got
called out of the audience because she was holding a sign that read, “My name
is Alison. Please let me spin the wheel because My Aim Is True” (a reference to
Costello’s first album, My Aim Is True, on which he recorded “Alison”). She got more than a wheel spin: she
got invited on the stage and Costello sang “Alison” directly to her for one of
the most moving parts of the show. I also liked the part in which Costello sent
the band off stage briefly and did two acoustic songs, one of which was “Slow
Drag with Josephine,” which he said was like an authentic ragtime-era number
(well, yeah — except the lyrics
are typical Costello, full of modern-day references and the sorts of stylish
puns that made me think he was the one person who could have replaced John
Lennon in a reunited Beatles — especially once he actually wrote a few songs
with Paul McCartney!), and the fact that unlike virtually all other modern
artists he was willing to do songs he hasn’t released on record, some of them
originals and some of them covers (the Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time” and the
Who’s “The Kids Are All Right” — I’d still want to hear Costello do the Who’s “Substitute” some day; Pete
Townshend basically wrote an Elvis Costello song a decade before Costello
started writing them himself! — as well as snatches of Smokey Robinson’s
“Tracks of My Tears” and “Tears of a Clown” which he tacked on to one of his
own songs). Though all things considered I’d probably rather be listening to
Elvis Costello exploring new musical horizons than reliving his past (and it
makes me feel damned old that I
can remember when these songs first came out … over three decades ago!), it’s still a fun disc and worthwhile for fans of
Elvis Costello and anyone who still holds to the faith that just because music
is “popular” doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be trivial.

Black Legion was more
melodramatic than I remembered it (director Archie L. Mayo probably told star Humphrey Bogart to give the somewhat
overwrought performance he did; I recall Bette Davis saying she had to fight
him for the right to underplay a
big scene when she felt that was appropriate), but it’s also still powerful and
surprisingly relevant to today. The story of Black Legion concerns a secret, Ku Klux Klan-like organization
(which actually existed), based in the northern Midwest and focused more on
foreign (mostly Eastern European) immigrants than on Blacks, but just as
unscrupulous and nasty. Bogart plays a factory worker who joins the Legion
after being passed over for a promotion in favor of the son of a Polish
immigrant, goes on a series of night rides that terrorize the town where all of
this is taking place and finally ends up shooting his best friend (Dick Foran)
when Foran, who’s learned the secrets of the Legion from Bogart when he was
drunk, threatens to go to the police. A dramatic courtroom finale, probably
inspired by Fritz Lang’s Fury,
shows a conscience-stricken Bogart breaking down in the middle of the trial
when his estranged wife (Erin O’Brien Moore) comes back; he abandons the
carefully constructed self-defense scenario the Legion has come up with,
confesses his own involvement and names names. In an amusing scene, the
organizers of the Legion turn out to be promoters who find selling “patriotism”
much more lucrative than the worthless oil stock that was their former source of
income. This, I understand, was actually historically true; the Klan of the
1920’s self-destructed over internal feuds, fueled by greed over which faction
would get the revenue from “official” Klan uniforms and other merchandise.Black Legion is all
too relevant today, when people like Tom Metzger (at least until the court
system took care of him) are organizing similar groups, and xenophobia is
becoming so powerful a force in American politics a major candidate for Mayor
of Los Angeles (Tom Houston) is basing his whole campaign on attacking
“illegal” immigrants. It is not at all difficult to imagine a modern remake of
this film — the targets of today’s equivalents to the Black Legion are Central
and South American immigrants rather than Eastern Europeans, but the hatred is
just as ugly and the potential for violence just as great. — 3/3/93

•••••

Black Legion was a
1937 Warner Bros. production, one of their “torn from the headlines” specials,
and gave Humphrey Bogart his first genuinely good role since he had come to
Warners in 1936 to repeat his stage role as the Dillinger-esque outlaw Duke
Mantee in The Petrified Forest.
(When Jack Warner gave him a crappy script and told him it would be his next
film, Bogart objected. “You can’t expect every picture you make to be as good
as The Petrified Forest or Black
Legion,” Warner said. “Why the hell not?”
Bogart replied.) The Black Legion was a real outfit, a bunch of Ku Klux Klan
wanna-bes who terrorized Michigan and other Midwestern states in the
mid-1930’s, and while their official list of targets included the usual
suspects — Jews, Roman Catholics and Blacks — their principal targets in
practice were white ethnics who supposedly were taking the jobs of “100 percent
Americans.” It came to an abrupt end in 1935 when the Legion killed a WPA
worker named Charlie Poole and Dean Dayton, the actual shooter, turned state’s
evidence at the trial. In the movie, Frank Taylor (Humphrey Bogart) is a
factory worker (we’re never told what the factory actually makes and the only
piece of equipment we see in operation is a drill press) who’s up for the job
of foreman, but the management instead promotes a younger worker, Joe
Dombrowski (Henry Brandon), because he’s been to college, he’s already worked
out a new invention that is saving the company money, and therefore they
decided he’s earned the promotion.

Taylor, who lives in decent but financially
strained circumstances with his wife Ruth (Erin O’Brien-Moore, who delivers a
quiet, finely honed performance that should have marked her for biggers and
betters) and their son Buddy (Dickie Jones), is counting on the promotion to
buy a new car and do some work on his house, and when Dombrowski gets the job
instead of him he goes into a black rage, drinking, screwing up on the job (and
getting a smarmy lecture from Dombrowski that he’s too good a workman to be
chewing up valuable drill bits by being careless) and generally moping around
until one night he hears a voice on the radio (the favorite medium of
hatemongers then and now) blaming all America’s ills on “foreigners” and
calling for “real Americans” to rise up against them — and do what, the voice
never actually quite says (back then there were still broadcast standards
enforced even against the Right-wing radio commentariat), but Taylor’s fellow
worker Cliff Summers (Joseph Sawyer) hears Taylor sounding off at work and
recruits him to the Black Legion. In one of a series of surprisingly
Gothic-looking scenes for a film directed by the usually hacky Archie Mayo
(there are more Gothic shots in Black Legion than in Bogart’s one out-and-out horror film, The
Return of Doctor “X”), Taylor assembles in
a wood as a Black Legion initiate and swears an oath to God and the Devil (“one
to reward and one to punish”) that turns out not to have been written by the screenwriters (Robert
Lord, story; Abem Finkel — Paul Muni’s brother-in-law — and William Wister
Haines, script), but by the actual Black Legion. I remember how stunned I was
when I saw a book from the 1930’s on then-current Right-wing movements in the
U.S., read the real Black Legion oath — and recognized it from the movie.

He
gets issued a Black Legion robe and hood, and also a Black Legion special .38
revolver — both of which he has to pay for out of his already meager earnings,
since (as an exposition scene soon tells us) the founders of the Black Legion
are a gang of con artists who previously sold worthless oil stock and couldn’t
care less about racism or foreigners allegedly taking over America. What
they’re after are the money they can make from membership dues and Black Legion
merchandise — something that turned out to be true of the real Black Legion’s organizers as well (we’ve come a long
way from the radical Right being financed by hucksters trying to make a buck to
today’s radical Right being financed by the already mega-rich who want to
remake society so they can be even mega-richer) when they were finally rounded
up and put on trial. Taylor’s first action as a Legion member is a nighttime
raid on the chicken farm owned by Joe Dombrowski’s father; they trash the
place, the Dombrowskis leave town and the foreman job opens up at last — only
Taylor loses it again when, in response to a demand from the Legion to increase
their recruitment efforts, he pulls a worker off a machine to talk to him in
the restroom and the inexperienced person he leaves in charge of it ends up
making a mistake that wrecks the machine completely. The foreman job goes
instead to Mike Grogan (Clifford Soubier), whose daughter Betty (Ann Sheridan)
is Ruth Taylor’s best friend. Betty’s fiancé, Ed Jackson (Dick Foran, who was
usually a decent-looking but pretty empty screen presence but actually rises
quite well to the challenge of playing the voice of reason in this film), gets
suspicious when the Black Legion stages an attack on Grogan that involves tying
him to two adjacent trees and whipping him (maybe Abem Finkel wrote this scene
with the inspiration of his brother-in-law’s sequence as a whipping victim in I
Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang — though we
don’t see the flogger land on Grogan’s flesh, the scene is still quite
terrifying explicit for a “post-Code” movie), and after Taylor’s drunk his way
out of his job, his wife and child have left him, and he’s taken up with Ed’s
slutty ex-girlfriend Pearl Danvers (Helen Flint), he spills the Black Legion’s
secrets to Ed while “in his cups.”

Ed immediately threatens to go to the police
(a script hole in a lot of 1930’s
movies; instead of saying he’s
going to go to the police and thereby alerting the bad guys that they’d better
shut him up pronto, why doesn’t he keep his mouth shut and just go?) and the Legion kidnaps him, takes him out to those
marvelously Gothic woods (the Warner ranch in Calabasas) and Frank Taylor
shoots his former friend when he tries to get away. He makes it as
far as a roadhouse, ditching his Black Legion uniform on the way (but keeping
the gun!), and two cops just happen
to show up there, notice his nervousness and arrest him. The Black Legion
concocts a cover story that Taylor shot Ed in self-defense after Ed started
threatening him with a gun over their rivalry for Pearl Danvers, and Pearl
herself testifies in the trial according to the Legion’s script — but Taylor
balks at the last minute because, with his wife and son in the courthouse, he
can’t lie and say he was planning to dump the good woman, especially not for
such a wretched scrap of female humanity as Pearl. Taylor agrees to name names
and the judge (Samuel S. Hinds) orders the courtroom sealed so all the Black
Legionnaires in attendance can be arrested, and eventually they’re convicted
and sentenced to life. Black Legion
remains a tough, uncompromising and brilliant movie, partly because of its
no-nonsense script, partly because of Bogart’s performance (he’s completely convincing
as a proletarian, and he believably depicts his bitterness and rage that gets
channeled into violence by the Legion, even though his character arc — a
basically good but limited man drawn into evil, who repents only when it’s too
late — is essentially the reverse of the one he later played in his star-making
vehicles, a world-weary cynic whose good instincts are roused into the service
of a cause greater than himself) and partly because the kinds of people who ran
the Black Legion are still very much around and, indeed, have far more power
today than they did in the 1930’s.

One could easily imagine the basic story
being remade today — even though one irony is that it’s people with names like
Dombrowski and Grogan, the targets of 1930’s nativists like the Black
Legionnaires, that today swell the ranks of the Tea Party and make similar
noises against people of color and Queers. The modern version would likely
start with a factory worker passed over for promotion by an affirmative-action
hire (the stories I’ve read about people joining the militia movement, the
White Aryan Resistance and other violent far-Right fringe groups of today
almost always begin with a reference to them having become embittered and led
to racist hate groups by losing a job, or perceiving themselves as having lost
a job, to affirmative action), then joining a Tea Party and finally getting
into a militia movement or something more serious and violent. The passions
that motivated the Black Legion both in life and on film are, if anything, more
widespread and influential now than they were in 1937 — then radical-Right
speakers had to thread the needle of a deliberately apolitical mass-media
structure to get on the air (even the most popular of them, Father Charles
Coughlin, ultimately was cancelled by CBS and, since he was a Roman Catholic
priest, he was also subject to the authority of the Vatican, who basically put
brakes on him); now they have their own media in talk radio and Fox News, and
the kind of Right-wing chatter that occasionally made it onto the airwaves in
1937 can now be heard 24/7 everywhere in the U.S. (Indeed, in most of the U.S.
it’s the only sort of political
opinion that can be heard on the air.) Black Legion is very much a movie of its time, but in some senses
it’s timeless — and the ending is particularly moving in that the one thing
that snaps Frank Taylor to his senses, the one good thing that’s withstood all
the bad he’s become, is his love for his family and his final unwillingness to
betray them. — 6/14/12

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Two nights ago Charles and I watched a quite interesting
Warner Bros. feature from 1953: The Master of Ballantrae, which was Errol Flynn’s last film as a Warners
contract player (five years he would return to the studio as a free-lancer to
play John Barrymore in Too Much, Too Soon — the memoir of Diana Barrymore, John’s daughter and Drew’s mother —
mainly because Jack Warner, who had worked with both Barrymore and Flynn, found
them equally talented and equally self-destructive, though as one of Flynn’s
biographers acidly pointed out it took Barrymore 62 years to drink, drug and
screw himself to death and Flynn accomplished it in just 50) and the last film
directed by veteran Warners hack William Keighley (his name is pronounced
“Keeley,” something I would never have known if I hadn’t heard one of the Lux
Radio Theatre broadcasts from after he
replaced Cecil B. DeMille as the series’ host because as a matter of Right-wing
principle DeMille refused to join the American Federation of Radio Artists) —
though he would live until 1984. It was based on an adventure novel by Robert
Louis Stevenson (one imdb.com commentator ranked it and the unfinished The
Weir of Hermiston as “generally conceded
today [to be] Robert Louis Stevenson’s two greatest works” — huh? Better than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Treasure Island or Kidnapped?) set during the 1740’s in Scotland, during the
last-ditch attempt of clan lords loyal to the Stuart family to dethrone the
House of Hanover as the ruling family of Great Britain and restore the Stuarts
to the throne in the persons of Bonny Prince Charlie and his father. Ballantrae
is a Scottish village ruled by the Durie family: father Lord Durrisdeer (Felix
Aylmer), oldest son Jamie Durie (Errol Flynn) and his younger brother Henry
(Anthony Steel). Never having read Stevenson’s novel I can’t vouch for how
close the adaptation is ­— though in at least one particular writers Herb
Meadow (screenplay) and Harold Medford (additional dialogue) — I guess your
initials had to be “H.M.” to get the job working on writing this movie! —
softened the tale. Stevenson apparently meant the work as a critique of family
feuding and the egomaniacal quest for “glory” in fighting for hopeless causes,
and to make that point he dispatched both younger Duries to their graves at the
end, while Meadow and Medford left both of them alive.

It was Warners’
last-ditch attempt to return Flynn to the costume-drama milieu in which he’d made his greatest successes and most
legendary films — Captain Blood
(1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940) —
though he was older and considerably stouter than he’d been in his prime, and
whereas he’d faked his way through the fencing duels in those previous movies
(much to the discomfiture of Basil Rathbone, who was an accomplished fencer and
rued that the scripts of Captain Blood and Robin Hood called
for him to lose his on-screen duels to Flynn, who faked it all), this time
around he had a fencing double, Bob Anderson. Anderson, who died just a month
or two ago, was best known for a film he worked on 24 years after this one —
the first Star Wars, in which he
was the on-screen body under the Darth Vader costume (though James Earl Jones
dubbed the character’s voice) and was picked because of his skill in fighting
on-screen duels; in The Master of Ballantrae he doubled for both Flynn and one of his on-screen
opponents and thereby “killed” himself. As presented on screen, the plot of The
Master of Ballantrae (incidentally the last
syllable is pronounced “-tray,” not
“-try”) actually tracks pretty closely to Flynn’s first starring vehicle, Captain
Blood: he ends up on the wrong side of a
civil war (Warners showed the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, where the
British redcoats mopped up the Scottish clans and the Stuart cause was defeated
once and for all, but they weren’t about to give this film enough of a budget
to stage any of the actual battle), has to flee the oppressive British
occupation of Scotland (they are executing anyone with any connection with the
rebellion), meets up with a comic-relief sidekick named Col. Francis Burke
(Roger Livesey, one of Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s favorite
actors) — an Irish officer who fought with the Stuarts — and the two of them
flee and eventually end up on a pirate ship captained by a supercilious
Frenchman, Captain Arnaud (Jacques Berthier).

They make an uneasy alliance with
him until the crew mutinies; they take over the ship from Arnaud but Jamie
takes it back and takes over as captain, and eventually they sail back to Scotland
with a treasure with which Jamie hopes to re-establish himself as the master of
Ballantrae and finally marry his high-born fiancée Lady Alison (Beatrice
Campbell). Earlier in the story Jamie had been shown having an affair on the
side with tavern wench Jessie Brown (Yvonne Furneaux), and when Alison showed
up at Jessie’s tavern on the night Jamie and Burke were supposed to take a
small boat to a smugglers’ vessel and flee for France, Alison kissed Jamie in
Jessie’s presence and Jamie had a hissy-fit of jealousy and got revenge by
reporting Jamie’s planned escape to the British, who intercepted them on the
beach and nearly captured them. Jamie had assumed his brother Henry (ya
remember Henry?) had turned him
in to get the Ballantrae estate and Alison’s hand for himself — and his
suspicions are only strengthened when he comes home and finds Henry living as
the master of Ballantrae (even though their father is still alive!) and engaged
to Alison, who justified her actions on the assumption that her real lover,
Jamie, was dead. (It seems to me there’s another Warner Bros. movie, a much
more prestigious one, that used this particular plot gimmick. Oh, right — Casablanca!) In the end Henry gets to keep the Ballantrae
estate and Jamie even gives him the treasure so he’ll have the funds he needs
to maintain it, but Alison runs off with Jamie and Burke, fleeing to heaven
knows where.

Not that this is a movie where one really cares about the plot:
it’s basically action porn, but at least it’s good action porn, and it’s also utterly gorgeous, not
only because it’s in three-strip Technicolor just as it was about to be
replaced by Eastmancolor but because the cinematographer is Jack Cardiff. The
Cardiff touch shows throughout this movie: the interiors burnished with a
painterly glow, the exteriors also looking like landscapes of the period and
not like soundstages with a nature painting as a backdrop — and I suspect
Cardiff may have directed some of the film because there’s a visual imagination
and a sense of excitement far beyond the norm for a film by William Keighley.
(Keighley’s and Flynn’s paths had crossed during the glory years: Keighley
started The Adventures of Robin Hood
but was fired because Jack Warner and Hal Wallis didn’t think his footage was
exciting enough, and Michael Curtiz was brought in to replace him while B.
Reaves “Breezy” Eason shot a lot of the action footage.) Flynn had actually
taken Cardiff under his wing and engaged him to make his directorial debut in a
1955 epic shot in Continental Europe; it was supposed to be the story of
William Tell, but after about half an hour of the film was shot Flynn’s
producers pulled their financial backing, he was unable to find replacement
money, and he lost what little money he had left over from his glory years at
Warners and was bailed out by Herbert Wilcox, British producer-director who
gave Flynn two fat parts in the musical spectacles he produced for his wife,
actress Anna Neagle, to star in. The Master of Ballantrae isn’t a great movie but it is a reasonably fun one, and while a number of imdb.com
commentators regretted Flynn hadn’t been able to make it a decade earlier
(though in the meantime Flynn’s acting chops had actually improved — in the
1940’s he turned in finely honed performances in Escape Me Never and That Forsyte Woman that would have been inconceivable for the Flynn of
the 1930’s), it’s still one of his best late films and a nice hour-and-a-half
of entertainment.

Monday, June 11, 2012

The night before last
Charles and I had watched a PBS pledge-break special called Big Band
Vocalists, a follow-up to another
big-band show they did a year or two ago (which I’ve got in the backlog but
haven’t actually watched yet) with some fairly familiar clips, hosted by Peter
Marshall (the host of Hollywood Squares in its heyday) and Nick Clooney (who’s lived his entire life in the
uncomfortable position of basking in reflected fame: first everyone thought of
him as Rosemary Clooney’s brother and now everyone thinks of him as George
Clooney’s father), many of them coming from two movies Columbia released in the
early- to mid-1940’s, Reveille with Beverly (1943) and Jam Session (1944). The film opened with a clip that seemed
just to drip with ironies: “I Had the Craziest Dream,” sung by Helen Forrest
and played by her then-boyfriend (as well as then-employer) Harry James from
the 1942 film Springtime in the Rockies, in color and (supposedly) taking place outdoors with a deep blue three-strip
Technicolor backdrop to represent sky. The irony comes from the fact that this
film was the occasion on which Harry James met the woman he’d jilt Helen
Forrest for, Betty Grable.

Next was the familiar clip from Stage Door
Canteen of Peggy Lee with Benny
Goodman’s orchestra singing “Why Don’t You Do Right?,” one of the few white
covers of a Black song that was better than the Black hit: it was written by
Joe McCoy, Memphis Minnie’s first husband, and recorded by Black singer Lil
Green as a rather dull blues dirge — a far cry from the brassy sassiness Lee
brought to it. Ironically, when this clip was shot the emphasis was on Benny
Goodman — Allen Jenkins’ introduction hails him and doesn’t mention her — but
within a decade she’d be a bigger star than he was, as the big bands faded and
solo singers became the new music stars. Then there was the famous Reveille
with Beverly clip of Frank Sinatra
singing “Night and Day” with six women piano players and what looked to be like
an all-woman string section — of which I wrote when Charles and I screened Reveille
with Beverly “complete,” “Though he was
already 27 when he made this film, Sinatra looks about 19, dressed in a slovenly bow tie (this was
when his first wife Nancy was still making them for him herself) and a black
suit that looks like he wore it to his high-school prom. The arrangement of the
song is gimmicky (powered by six female pianists and an all-woman string
section — well, that was one way to ensure your musicians wouldn’t get drafted!) and gets in the way
of Sinatra’s phrasing (especially as compared to the prayer-like record of it
he’d made with Axel Stordahl for Victor in 1942), but he already had the magic
that would make and (except for that bad patch in the late 1940’s/early 1950’s)
keep him a superstar. When Sinatra became the teen-idol sensation of the early
1940’s, Columbia advertised this film as if he were the star — probably pissing
off audiences who paid their money and then got to see him just as a guest
artist singing one song.”

The next song was the Andrews Sisters singing “Don’t
Sit Under the Apple Tree” from the 1942 “B” Private Buckaroo (a far less prestigious vehicle for Harry James
than Springtime in the Rockies, though nothing of James was included in this program) — the giveaway
was that the great comedian Shemp Howard was shown in the clip —and after that
there was a quirky, possibly postwar, clip of Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers
singing “It Started All Over Again.” It was a lovely song and well sung, but
somehow one (this one, anyway) missed the extra suavity and elegance Frank
Sinatra had brought to his record of the song with Tommy Dorsey, on which
Stafford and the Pipers were his backup singers. Afterwards they showed a clip
from one of Martin Block’s late-1940’s shorts with Buddy Clark singing “I’ll
Dance at Your Wedding” with Ray Noble’s band (Noble looked considerably more than 10 years older than the youngish man who’d
played the foofy suitor of Joan Fontaine in the Fred Astaire musical A
Damsel in Distress, and Clark looked like a
used-car salesman, but there was nothing wrong with his voice), and afterwards
they showed an unidentified clip of Jimmy Dorsey’s band with Bob Eberly and
Helen O’Connell doing their famous tag-team vocals (he’d sing the song
“straight,” Dorsey would play a jazz solo, and then O’Connell would come in and
sing the song in jazz style and tempo), and after that they showed a quite impressive clip of Dick Haymes
doing a song called “You Send Me (Right Out of This World).” This was actually
the best Haymes I’ve heard; for once in his life he actually seemed to give a
damn about phrasing and soul.

Then they showed Alice Faye singing “You’ll Never
Know” from the 1943 period musical Hello, Frisco, Hello (the song was written for the film and was one of
Harry Warren’s three Academy Award winners, along with “Lullaby of Broadway”
and “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”), and afterwards they showed
Perry Como with his original employer and mentor, Ted Weems, doing “I Wonder
Who’s Kissing Her Now” — obviously a later 1950’s clip from Como’s TV show rather than one featuring the
then-unknown Como with Weems in the 1930’s. The next segment (the pledge breaks
were distributed in the show at five-song intervals) opened with Doris Day
singing “It’s Magic” from her first film, Romance on the High Seas — a glorious performance, but Sarah Vaughan did
the song even better on her Musicraft recording, and it’s a real pity no one at
Warners thought to hire Sarah Vaughan and an all-Black supporting cast and
shoot a “race version” of the movie right after La Doris and the white cast finished. Then came the other
clip from Reveille with Beverly, Ella Mae Morse with Freddie Slack doing “Cow Cow Boogie,” a song which
holds up beautifully (it’s one of the legitimate claimants as the first-ever
rock ’n’ roll song) despite Morse’s idiotic costuming: as I wrote when I saw
this last, “Though stuck with a silly-looking dress that attempts to be
creating bull’s-eyes on her nipples, she still comes through and is one of the
legitimate claimants for the title of first white rock ’n’ roll singer.” Then
they showed a clip of Tex Beneke’s band (post-war, after the death of Glenn
Miller and Beneke’s attempt to continue not only the band itself but its
trademark “sound” of a clarinet doubling the sax line an octave higher — Duke
Ellington was known for this in the early 1930’s but for some reason Miller got
the credit for thinking up this bit of orchestral color) and a 1960’s TV
appearance of Dinah Shore with the Duke Ellington band doing “Blues in the
Night.”

The segment ended with a Jam Session clip of the Bob Crosby band, complete with Crosby
and a vocal group, expanding the marvelous novelty “Big Noise from Winnetka”
(originally a record featuring just Bob Haggart on bass and Ray Bauduc on drums — including a bit in which
Bauduc “plays” Haggart’s bass strings by hitting them with his drumsticks —
I’ve liked to cite this to “dance music” fans as the first “drum-and-bass”
record in history, since that’s all it is) into a full-fledged song, though the
additions really don’t add that much to the marvels of the original. The next
and final segment began with a late-1940’s color clip of unknown provenance of
Rosemary Clooney doing “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” (beautifully, but
Billie Holiday’s 1937 record was even more beautiful). The next two were
“mystery clips” of Nat “King” Cole and Tony Martin from Cole’s 1950’s TV show
duetting on “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (Martin would have sounded just
fine if he’d been alone, but Cole so totally out-phrased, out-swung and out-sang him the clip was a bit pathetic) and June
Christy with Stan Kenton doing the great novelty song “Tampico” (one actually
written for Christy’s predecessor with Kenton, Anita O’Day, but by the time
Kenton was ready to record it O’Day had quit over the Kenton’s band chronic
rhythmic stiffness). The segment continued with the other Jam Session clip, Louis Armstrong wandering through a
nightclub in which the entire clientele seemed to be part of his band or his
dance troup while performing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” in a version
that showed off just how much more self-assured as a performer he was than when
he first recorded the song in 1929 even though, as I wrote when Charles and I
first saw Jam Session, “The
staging is silly: Armstrong is a singing, trumpet-playing bartender whose
musicians are lounging around the interior of the bar while a long line of
African-American chorines sit at the bar and gape at him in wordless
admiration.”

After that almost
nothing could have followed, but the makers of this special plugged in Kate
Smith’s performance of “God Bless America” from the 1943 Warners color musical This
Is the Army — and Smith became so
totally identified with this song it was a surprise when a few of her other
records trickled out and it turned out she’d actually sung other things in her
life. I remember getting the Columbia Legacy two-CD set From Gershwin’s
Time, a celebration of the 100th anniversary of George Gershwin’s birth by collecting contemporaneous recordings
of his songs — and “I Got Rhythm,” introduced by Ethel Merman on stage in the
original production of the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, was sung there by Kate Smith, whose voice was just
as big as Merman’s and whose musicianship (especially her intonation) was far
superior. The “God Bless America” clip featured some proto-music video effects,
including a shot of Mount Rushmore, footage of President Franklin Roosevelt and
black-and-white newsreel clips of America’s WW2 military in action, and it
ended with a priceless shot of future president Ronald Reagan (who had a
featured role in the complete film) with that same clueless
deer-in-the-headlights look he had when he was president. Big Band Vocalists was oddly lacking in African-American talent —
just Armstrong, Cole and Ellington (the last atypically represented by a TV
clip from well past the heyday of the big
bands — if I were doing a show about great big-band vocalists I would surely
have included the Soundie of Ivie Anderson singing “I’ve Got It Bad and That
Ain’t Good” with the Ellington band in 1940, but this show completely avoided
Soundies altogether, perhaps because very few of them survive in good
condition): no Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan (maybe PBS was
saving them for another pledge-break show, Jazz Icons, in which Ella and Sarah do indeed appear) — but
aside from that lapse it was a fun show and a worthy tribute to the era even if
the gabbing of Messrs. Marshall and Clooney did get oppressive at times.